


A Very True Account that Dragons are Real

by EmmaLuLuChu



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: A fans self input on how they would like the movies to end, After the Dragons Disappear, Also a gift, Descendant of Hiccup, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 21:10:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5220953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmmaLuLuChu/pseuds/EmmaLuLuChu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day, the dragons began to leave. No one truly knows where they were going, or the reason why, but that they were flying off of islands, out of villages, from the homes of the humans they lived with, either sneaking under the cover of night, or sending one last glance towards the Vikings they had bonded with, before they sunk into the deep darkness of the sea.</p>
<p>This went on until the last dragon, still there as his friends hair was starting to turn gray, was Toothless, ever faithful.</p>
<p>But even the most faithful had to heed the mysterious call.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Very True Account that Dragons are Real

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tamer Lorika](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Tamer+Lorika).



_Berk and the Barbaric Archipelago as a whole was finally at peace with the end of the Long War of Blood and Fire._

_Tribe relations were the best they’d ever been. No more battles, no more raids, no more alliances to be sure to make it to the next month. No more Bad Things occurred ever again between the villages._

_The Chief responsible for it all, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third of the Hairy Hooligans Tribe, upheld the peace that rippled through out the land, the peace he had helped create with the cooperation of the King of All Dragons, his best friend Toothless, so that the seas could be calm. He’d had three children and many grandchildren with his wife and Commander of Defense Astrid Hofferson, before passing away peacefully in his sleep of old age._

_This wonderful period of time was known as Odin’s Prosperous Age._

_But as most splendid periods of time goes, it couldn’t last forever._

_One day, the dragons began to leave. No one truly knows where they were going, or the reason why, but that they were flying off of islands, out of villages, from the homes of the humans they lived with, either sneaking under the cover of night, or sending one last glance towards the Vikings they had bonded with, before they sunk into the deep darkness of the sea._

_This went on until the last dragon, still there as his friends hair was starting to turn gray, was Toothless, ever faithful._

_But even the most faithful have to heed the mysterious call._

_The only known account of what occurred for ages was from a small entry found in a notebook that belonged to Astrid, two small paragraphs telling about her waking to find her husband’s side of the bed empty, along with the slab the Night Fury slept on, then barely making it three steps downstairs before she saw Hiccup’s back turned to her while sitting in front of the hearthplace, the worn leather saddle that was normally on the dragon at her husband’s hip._

_A sketchbook that had belonged to Hiccup himself was discovered recently, and held a passage that shed some more light on what had happened the day the last dragon left._

_“I believe I’m ready to tell of what happened the night Toothless heeded the call._

_I could hardly sleep once the Great Leave started, and even then I could only ever go into a light sleep on good nights. I could never imagine my best friend just up and leaving, but the more I heard being whispered around the village, the more my irrational fear climbed. So one night when I felt the tiniest nudge at my hand, It’s a wonder how I didn’t collide heads with the speed I had sat up at._

_When I saw it was Toothless, somehow my mind had thought he’d woken me for some miniscule reason, such as a midnight snack, or needed the hatch on the roof opened to step out to do his ‘business’._

_One look into his eyes, and I could practically hear a voice in my head sorrowfully say,_

_‘It’s time.’_

_Immediately I whispered in reply, almost sounding like I was fifteen again with the way my voice quivered,_

_‘One last flight. Please.’_

_We slipped away as quietly as we could, down the stairs and through the front door, barely having the thought of this truly being the last time before we mounted and flew off._

_I still remember so much from that last flight, the way the light from the flames of the village flickered across the sleek black scales covering my friends body, how the wind caressed my hair as if comforting me, and when the sea splashed its waves it was as if it was crying in sorrow._

_Clouds hung in the sky, and when we glided through it the stars winked at us, and the glow of the moon seemed to bid us goodbye as we dived back down, leaving the world I’d come to love so much._

_I never wanted it to end._

_As the moon fell closer to the horizon, we finally descended, down into the place where everything had started, down to our second home, the secret cove where our forbidden friendship had first begun._

_As I felt the tug of the earth pull me down closer, my mind produced the thought of never letting it end. To follow my partner to where the call come from, to keep the wholeness we had become together, to stay with him until my dying days-_

_But dragons can live for so much longer than a human does. It wouldn’t be fair to follow and make Toothless watch as I aged and passed away, far too cruel of an action to do to a creature that was the last of its kind._

_And what of the village? Their Chief disappearing without a care for anyone else, Gods and my family, Astrid and my children?_

_To fly away with Toothless was a Fools fantasy. We had our destinies, and while they had intertwined, they now came apart, to the final places we must go._

_I had Berk and everything upon it, he had the sea and every dragon it holds._

_When we landed, it took more strength than I ever imagined to dismount._

_As I removed the saddle that connected us together, it felt as if the earth was locking a shackle onto my foot, and I knew that it was the only world I’d ever know now._

_I can never tell when I had started to cry, whether it was the moment I woke, during the last flight, or as we landed in the cove._

_I only remember standing there,  as I stared into the eyes of the other part of me I never knew I was missing, and crying like a newborn babe that had just left the only comfort it knew._

_There was still so much I wanted to tell Toothless, and I could see that he did too, but no more time to say everything. The only thing I could do was hold him close, finding a small comfort in the way my arms gently circled around the Night Fury’s neck and how the scales caught at the smallest grooves of my fingertips, and put all I wished to say into a single sentence._

_“I **promise** that the world will always remember that dragons are real.”_

Henry faked a cough into his elbow, squeezing his eyes tight to quickly get rid of the tears welling up in them, straightening himself up and glancing back down at the packet in his hands. He found where he had stopped, and continued,

“And that is how the dragons disappeared. Not all at once, but in a quiet, gradual, depressing way. One day, maybe, the dragons will return, so that I, too, like my Great Grandfather, can say that there were dragons when I was a boy.”

Henry lowered his family history report, shuffling his feet while he finished,

“So, uh, that was my presentation of my ancestry project. At least the oral part. Yeah.”

He finally looked up at his audience, the entirety of his History class, which he hadn’t done since he first started to talk.

Everybody was staring at him as if he’d grown three heads and spoken an impossible riddle.

The bell rang before anything else could be said, chairs scratching and small talk filling the air, overtop it all, the History teacher Mrs. Cowell, telling everyone that the presentations would continue the next day and for everyone to leave the family tree visual aids at the front.

Henry had just shouldered his bag when he heard his teacher call out to him, inwardly sighing as he turned and walked to where she sat in a chair by the whiteboard, handing over his paper upon seeing her outstretched hand.

Henry fidgeted as Mrs. Cowell glanced over his paper, a lot lengthier than everybody else’s, and by far the one thing he was most proud of, but knew exactly what she would say to him.

“Henry, this was supposed to be a report on someone of your choice from your family heritage.”

“But it is!”

She sighed and looked up to the freshman before her, a gangly teen with wide forest green eyes and auburn hair, enhanced with a face full of freckles, thinking of how best to word her thoughts,

“I don’t doubt that your bloodline goes all the way back to Viking times, but. . . dragons? Henry, I wish as much as you that such beautiful and stunning creatures existed, but they didn-“

“That’s the thing though, they didn’t die off! They just went into the ocean to hibernate, and only roughly 5% of the ocean has been explored, so it makes sense! A-And when dragons under go such a drop in temperature they stay in a suspended state that’s called a Sleep Coma, and they can stay in that state for who knows how lo-“

“Henry Haddock.” Instantly the boy quieted, shoulders hunching inward as the woman rubbed at her eyes.

“Henry, you are by far one of my brightest students, and I hated that you never applied yourself. I was so happy to see you putting so much effort into this report, but this. . . You have such an imaginative nature, but there’s a time and a place for that, and doing it as a project for History isn’t the best time. You’ve been in high school for a bit now, so we both know you understand how classwork goes. I’ll give you a chance to rewrite this, without dragons, and have it on my desk by the end of next Tuesday, alright?”

He nodded, taking back his report, turning around and making his way to the door to leave, when Mrs. Cowell called out to him again,

“Henry, I do really think it’s a wonderful story, that dragons are merely hibernating and do exist, maybe you could think about writing a book with it?"

He shrugged, too down to even turn around and smile back at her, trudging out through the door and starting his walk home.

Mrs. Cowell sighed, glancing over at the visual aid Henry had made, nicely printed words and hand drawn details, frustrated about the school administrator pressing on her for allowing too much imagination to seep into the class.

_‘How wonderful it’d be to have a dragon, maybe it could spit some fireballs at the administrator, or if it’s especially cheeky it could poop on his work desk.’_

She let herself have a chuckle at the thought before gathering her things together to go home for the day.

-

Light crept through the branches in the thickly-wooded forest, just enough to show a worn dirt path, many wears of feet trodding over it making a noticeable groove in the packed earth. Hardly anybody walked this road in this day and age, save for one freckled high schooler.

The boy skulked along, hands deep in his jacket pockets and headphones in his ears, a video game soundtrack playing to keep him moving along.

Henry came to a stop at a level area, tugging the headphones out and shoving them into his pockets as he swung his bag off his shoulder and placed it onto the ground, getting to his knees and opening the bag.

Notebooks and papers were taken out and dropped, each item sending a small cloud of dirt up. He finally stopped once his hand found what he wanted, pulling them out and sunlight shining onto two books, one bigger and one smaller.

Henry stared at the large leather bound book in his hands, fingers opening it and skimming the pages, covered all over in scribbles of a lost language, and drawings of designs and sketches of Vikings, and most of all; dragons. 

Dragons in all sorts of colors and shapes and sizes.

A two footed teal dragon, a crown of spikes ringing its head. A squat dragon in earthy tones, almost like a cluster of boulders. A cat sized dragon with buggy eyes and snacking on a fish. A dragon almost consisting of nothing but spikes and white eyes, a two headed dragon, a dragon turning a dead carcass inside-out-

Henry’s brain halted in awe, once more landing upon sketches of his favorite dragon.

An elegant black dragon, piercing green eyes that varied from slit pupils to doe-eyed innocence. Long, powerful wings stretched out, a mouth of razor sharp teeth open wide in a roar or nothing but gums and a lolling tongue, and always, _always_ missing its left tailfin.

He lowered the book into his lap, frowning at the replay of Mrs. Cowell’s words.

No, they couldn’t be nothing more than a fairytale. There was no way this book had been faked, filled with a fake language and pictures

He glanced down at the smaller one leather bound book, placing the other down and picking this one up. He slowly, carefully, meticulously, unfolded the treasure within.

‘ _No way could anybody fake_ this.’

Now what lay before him was five by six feet of a map, hand drawn with charcoal and formed together by many pieces of parchment.

Once again, that foreign language was dotted about, describing all these different places, and images of the same dragons drawn in the other book dotted the different islands all around.

Were this a joke, which it wasn’t, the joke would rather be on the one whom had forged this material in the first place, to put so much effort in order to get a mere laugh.

But Henry knew, deep down within, that _nothing_ about this was a joke or jeer.

These were the actual documents of his fiftieth-or-so great grandfather, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third.

Henry had gone through a _lot_ to learn about his great grandfather, given how much of Viking times were saved and documented (read; basically sparsely scattered bits of info and theories, thank goodness he’d come across that old chest at his grandparents), but he had trudged on.

And he wouldn’t so easily back down.

_‘I’m_ positive _there’s a way to contact the school board about something like this.’_

He idly heard a snap of a twig somewhere behind him, but paid it no mind. Curious animals were oft seen and heard within this solitary forest he would traverse through. He went back to his thought about talking with the school board, even though now it seemed a bit much, maybe he could talk with the principal first-

However, he DID mind any animal that would walk right up behind him to snuffle at his ear.

He yelped, scrambling as he stood and tried to move over a couple feet, tripping and crawling the rest of the way. He turned, ready to shoo away whatever possum or deer had wandered that close to him, but found himself frozen as he stared deep into electrifying green eyes that belonged to the giant black creature before him.

Henry tried to remember if there were ever any bears that lived in the forest until he noticed the wings that trailed on each side of what he could only assume was a _dragon._

His minds eye flashed the pictures of that dragon in the book with the wings and the teeth and the eyes, and his heart just about stopped when he saw the tail was missing its left tailfin.

-

Toothless stared at the boy before him.

He looked _just_ like _his Boy._

But it couldn’t be, he’d said goodbye to an older face with hair turning gray, but almost by a miracle, here He was once more.

By gods, he even _smelled_ like Him, just the faintest bit. That smell of pressed trees and burnt wood and tanned hide, all that was missing was the smell of hot coals and soot and the taste of salt and fish from the sea.

The boy stared wide eyed, fingers shaking as it raked through the copper hair on his head, did the boy have tiny braids tucked behind his ear? Were there even still Vikings in this faraway time?

Toothless cautiously took a step forward, the boy flinching and pulling himself into a tight ball, noises of distress coming and rising in volume. The Night Fury tried to think of a way to show he didn’t mean harm, he just wanted to know if by some chance this was _his Boy_ in some way.

The dragon took a step back, sitting back on his haunches, and waited as the boy slowly moved an arm to the side to peek at him. The Night Fury knew just what to do to show the boy that he could trust him, trying to remember how to make his muscles work to form that strange mouth upturn _his Boy_ did so often and would make him laugh when he tried it.

The other boy just stared, wide forest eyes glancing between his bare mouth, his wings dropped down on each side, or his tail as it flicked about behind him.

Toothless closed his mouth, letting his front paws touch the ground, ducking his head in what he hoped was an invitation. The human slowly got up onto his feet, and took even longer as he made cautious steps towards him.

The boy hesitated for a moment, just barely, before he rose a hand shaking like a leaf, having to shut his eyes before he could fully extend the appendage towards the Night Fury.

The dragon hesitated for a moment too, a long-ago fuzzy memory coming to his minds eye and making him pause at the familiarity of it, but made sure to be gentle as he placed his nose in the smooth groove of the childs palm.

Warmth radiated through his body at the point of touch, finally taking away the ice coldness he had slept in for so long, and filling him with an overwhelming sense of _peace._

And if a dragon could cry, Toothless would’ve wept when he finally heard _his Boy_ speak,

“I _knew_ you were real.”

That day, the dragons came back.

**Author's Note:**

> So this started out as me getting an idea down sometime after the second movie had come out, but I lost motivation for it with a lot of stuff going on irl so I let it be and sit on my computer. I signed up to do the Secret Odin gift exchange that's run by Berk's Grapevine, and I was given Tamer who has a blog over on picktheonesthatlast.tumblr.com, and after I took a look at the blog I realized that he'd be somebody who would like what this piece of fanfic was about. That combined with the release of the last book for the series by Cressida motivated me to complete what I hoped would be the way the dragons disappeared. While similar, I do love how Mrs. Cowell ended it so much, and this fic is kind of what I hope Dreamworks will do once the third film comes out. The idea just gives me hope about the fate of the dragons, and a belief that maybe they'll come back within the lifetime of us Hooligans.
> 
> Happy Snoggletog everybody!


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